Which is why /u/jailbaitlover I mean /u/spez is sending the message that they would gladly give total power to whatever mod crosses the picket line so they can boot the rest.
If Reddit had to replace all these mods it would be complete chaos and is not much better than the blackout. They will see the same exact problems Twitter has seen since they fired most of their content moderators.
Two reasons:
Replacing a lot of mods at once is going to result in a lot more of the latter and eliminate a lot of the former.
Third and most likely reason: you got involved in the early days with something that was really small, but mushroomed to become something really big.
I would classify that as a subset of my first bullet point, but it’s not an unreasonable distinction.